Devils Tower, Close Encounters of the Third Kind

In Crook County, Wyoming, a cylindrical tower more than 1,000 ft. (300 m) tall stands alone in an open plane. The structure, known as Devils Tower, is recognizable to anyone who has seen Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the climax of the film, several characters — who have been so unknowingly obsessed with the structure that they have sculpted it in mashed potatoes and repeatedly sketched it — descend on Devils Tower, where they greet a gargantuan alien mother ship (below, the money shot arrives at about the 1:30 mark). Yet the stone tower was famous long before its association with UFOs. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt named Devils Tower, a sacred symbol to several Native American tribes, the U.S.’s first national monument.